Writing the Modern City Ch 12 (original) (raw)
Related papers
2021
Walter Benjamin, a philosopher, and theorist associated with Frankfurt School, is known as one of the leading figures in studies about urban modernity. The point that "modern city" is the central theme of many of Benjamin's works, has been investigated in several studies. However, what has been mostly neglected is the influence of visual/spatial qualities of the modern city on shaping Benjamin's method for thinking, thereby writing, and forming the perceptive experience of readers while facing such texts. The present research, which is qualitative and fundamental research based on qualitative content analysis, correlates the origins of visual and spatial qualities in Benjamin's writings with his interest in images and his studies on visual arts and the visual culture of the modern city. Concentrating on two chief works by Benjamin about city, One Way Street and The Arcades Project, the article tries to review the specifications of this method of writing. It is discussed that as Benjamin considers "flaneur" as the archetype of modernity who wanders across the urban landscapes, his writing method recalls a reader who seeks flanerie among textual landscapes. This research seeks to understand what perceptive qualities emerge for the audience-flaneur among the urban landscapes of Benjamin's texts that distinguish this experience from the experiences of reading traditional forms of text? Thereafter, it is concluded that in opposition to traditional forms of reading based on the perception of an isolated, motionless, concentrated subject, the flanerie-like encounter with the text is a distracted reading which is shaped in an absent-mindedness condition. The subject of such a reading is a collective, corporeal, and moving subject. In this regard and while reading, the audience experiences the text through collective corporeality, similar to the mass experience of the modern metropolis.
A Phenomenological Approach on the Perception of Architecture in Literature
ATINER ' s Conference Paper Series, 2016
This study aims at searching for alternatives of architectural experiences in literature. Architecture is something abstract that can be scrutinized. Besides, architectural spaces are concrete spaces that can be experienced. Phenomenological readings will provide a base for abstract and concrete duality of spatial experience in conception of architecture. Specifically, architecture supplies spaces for people, and works of literature can give narrations of these spaces. Factual experience is possible by being in or around, moving through and observing spaces. It is not always possible to directly experience an architectural space represented in a photograph, film, or a book. Photographs and films put forth a visual source, whereas books give a textual source. These two sources do not provide real experience, but different kinds of perception (experience). However, what differentiates a textual source from a visual one is that it allows imagination of a space derived from words. In the case of a visual source, most of the time, an image of a particular space is presented as already constructed by having already passed through one’s mind and imagination; as a result, that image reflects the perception of a space from a certain viewpoint. An imaginary experience, on the other hand, is assumed to be achieved by reading words and translating them into an image of abstract spatiality. Therefore, a work of literature becomes a kind of domain where its reader is able to construct an image of the speculated spaces by his own interpretation. In the scope of this study, a novel written in Turkish, titled “Apartment Void (Apartman Boşluğu)” is chosen to look at architecture from a phenomenological perspective, because it offers spatial narrations that can be analyzed in the framework of phenomenological comparisons between the notions of space-place, temporary-permanent, inside-outside, and in-between situations. The author, Hakan Bıçakçı, is not a well-known writer; the preference of this particular work is solely due to its spatial narrative value.
Ars Aeterna
This article seeks to explore the parallels between the spatial turn embraced by contemporary literary theory and the so-called textual turn in architecture. More specifically, links between the contemporary developments of architectural theory and practice and literary criticism are established. In order to highlight the nature and origin of the connection between these two contemporary tendencies, this paper draws on a number of authoritative texts of both literary criticism as well as architectural theory, predominantly within the Anglo-American context. Architecture is presented from the viewpoint of the 20th and 21st centuries, which accentuates its liberation from a purely formal understanding by emphasizing the human involvement in its interpretation. The conception and structuring of physical spaces are therefore regarded as conditioned by processes similar to those involved in the construction of meaning in language and literature. Thus, while literary studies benefits from...
Ars Aeterna, 2022
This article seeks to explore the parallels between the spatial turn embraced by contemporary literary theory and the so-called textual turn in architecture. More specifically, links between the contemporary developments of architectural theory and practice and literary criticism are established. In order to highlight the nature and origin of the connection between these two contemporary tendencies, this paper draws on a number of authoritative texts of both literary criticism as well as architectural theory, predominantly within the Anglo-American context. Architecture is presented from the viewpoint of the 20th and 21st centuries, which accentuates its liberation from a purely formal understanding by emphasizing the human involvement in its interpretation. The conception and structuring of physical spaces are therefore regarded as conditioned by processes similar to those involved in the construction of meaning in language and literature. Thus, while literary studies benefits from the extension of its field of study through the inclusion (and contemporary primacy) of the spatial point of view, architectural criticism invites active participation in the construction of its meaning, in other words, its reading. The processes of the mutual influencing and enrichment of both the textual turn in architecture and the spatial turn in literary studies is exemplified by means of contemporary architectural works that embody the synergic relationship of the two traditionally separate fields – (literary) text and architecture.
Ars aeterna, 2022
Her research focuses on the study of spatial poetics of contemporary British literature. Her other academic interests include the study of phenomenology of perception, especially in the connection with the depiction of architecture in literature. She has participated in international conferences and published articles on Simon Mawer, E.M. Forster, Iris Murdoch, and J.G. Ballard in academic journals and essay collections abroad and in the Czech Republic. She is the author of the monograph The Country House Revisited: Variations on a Theme from Forster to Hollinghurst (2017).
Textual Cities/Working Drawings: Rereading the Space of Drawing
Writingplace: Investigations in Architecture and Literature (nai010), 2016
The analogy of the text is a common one for space and the city, whether it is referred to in terms of reading, enunciating (De Certeau) or writing it (Serres). In the beginning of the 20th century, the new theories of space-time and the increasing mobility and mechanization of the world brought forward the inadequacy of architectural notation to engage with the complex interactions of movement that take place in the city. Normative representations of the city conventionally forgo the microbe-like processes that occur within it. This partial illegibility of the city (Allen) appears to refer back to the illegibility of movement, and the temporal and kinetic character of space. This paper looks at the transcriptive operations that take place between real space and the space of the architectural drawing as an opportunity to rethink and expand the limits of architectural representation in order to embrace the complex negotiations and interactions that occur in the city. This emphasis on the infraordinary (Perec) reveals the users and their non-human counterparts as the markers of différance (Derrida) within the text of the city, bringing individual experience to the centre of this reading. In the textual city the users configure space both physically and perceptively. This paper is further concerned with the transcription of this condition into another form of writing and particularly with the transference of the effect of various agencies from one to the next.The locus of the reading is transposed from the city to the drawing that forms a new site of investigation, yet the characters remain the same. The drawing as ‘writing’ involves a series of ‘readings’. As the architect faces the duality of being a ‘reader’ and an ‘author’, the transition from the actual to the virtual cannot be considered as being merely a transcription from experience to sign. Moreover, the author’s intentions are not just liable to the intentions of an external reader but to internal agencies such as the material procedures involved and the autonomy of the signs in use. The drawing becomes an operator in the narrative of space while the architect himself acquires the status of the ‘character’. Drawing from Roland Barthes’ opposition between the text and the literary work, this paper will conclude that the textual nature of the city should already presuppose the nature of the drawing as a site of interpretative readings, a process itself temporal and kinetic, capable of revealing the possibility of new realities.
Narrative Language, Architecture and the City
2020
The contribution offers a new perspective on the topic of narratives, settling links between the city, cognitive theories and the history of Architecture. As it has been neglected from a historical perspective, the power of narratives in architecture is being investigated at its most intimate roots. The paper succeeds in this work by drawing on the theories of cognitive and semiotic psychology, shedding light on architecture through its users. The individual in society, its construction, and most intimate contamination are intrinsically linked to the milieu of his/her own communities, in a continuous interaction between actions and habits, between phenomena and consolidated, stored narratives. A new space for architecture emerges. A space that not only supports as a shelter but also influences these habits, actively participating in the urban storytelling training process. Thus, as part of a whole, the architect finds his own place in contemporary cultural narratives, abandoning the...